Shift to the Future

I received an email a few months ago from Twitter saying that I was four years old.  I signed up for Twitter way back in March 2007.  At the time I didn’t really have a clue what to do with the prompt “What’s happening?” and mostly forgot about Twitter until sometime in 2009.  A few colleagues had started to really use and benefit from Twitter and they kept nudging me to get on board.  I did and the rest is history… There are many different tools for various modes of networking around media and medium for video, bookmarking / tagging, blogging, socializing, sharing, business connecting, presenting, etc.  People often join social networking sites like Twitter as part of a workshop or learning series only to rarely or never return.  In my experience, the sign-up numbers vs active users are quite different.  Twitter is definitely growing though as evident in this 2010 graph: I just gave a talk and hands-on session at the BC ASBO annual meeting in...

I was fast walking a steep incline on the treadmill at the gym the other day and all around me are people BBMing, texting, tweeting, Facebooking, emailing, and sometimes talking on their mobile devices.  I thought, ‘this is crazy, can’t people escape their devices for even an hour?’.  It occurred to me that perhaps people are becoming ‘slaves of their machines’ – they are becoming obsessed . We often read about the decline in readership for magazines and newspapers.  People have moved over to reading on their machines.  TV viewers have become Internet viewers and participants, via their machines.  Entertainment has moved to becoming machine orchestrated through XBox, Kinect, PS3, Game Boy, World of Warcraft, and ‘apps’, etc..  We can’t travel without a Google or Bing map, a GPS, or a cell, er smart-phone (for safety of course).  We use stoves, ovens, microwave ovens, toasters, griddles, irons, washers, dryers, furnaces, freezers, drills, saws, coffee...

Over the past couple of years our school district has been working to develop a ‘dream vision’.  We have been fortunate to have a top thought leader, Dr. Andy Hargreaves , working with us to develop an inspiring, inclusive, compelling, learner-centered vision: Learning without Boundaries.  Last week our Design Team met to “clearly define the SD43 dream vision, Learning without Boundaries ”.  This team consisted of students, parents, teachers, principals, managers, superintendents, and trustees. One of the exercises our highly skilled facilitator   Myriam Laberge asked us to do, in advance, was a futurist activity (sure got my attention).  We were asked to (paraphrased): Imagine that it is now 2020. Over the past decade, the Coquitlam School District (SD43) has consistently built on its strong positive foundations to make its inspiring and inclusive dream of “Learning Without Boundaries” come alive through innovative, tangible and effective outcomes. In f...

Our District has formed a small focus group of early learning teachers to experiment with documenting the learning of K-3 students (starting with a few Kindergarten classes) in an unconventional way.  Teachers will use video cameras, digital cameras, and audio recorders to capture students learning.  The intent is to make the learning transparent, to capture artifacts that can be used for various forms of reporting.  Parents could access their child’s “portfolio” of learning and see how they’re progressing relative to the curriculum.  Teachers will see how they could use this type of documentation to replace the traditional “report card” for formal reporting as well. At this age group, play based learning is often the norm.  Video will be used to capture kids in action creating things, acting in a play, working in groups, drawing, and just playing together.  Student work will be photographed at stages and the pictures assembled to show a progression over t...

School systems are faced with two major forces that I believe will cause sweeping changes: personalized learning and technology.  Personalized learning means different things to different people but it will likely involve significant changes for how teaching occurs, how students learn and demonstrate learning, who’s responsible for learning, how learning is assessed, what core knowledge should be, what skills must be learned, etc. along with a growing reliance on technology.  Turning to technology, there are some very significant trends occurring that will affect learning and teaching but also have a disruptive impact on the work of Information Technology (IT) departments.  The sky’s the limit when we’re talking about the future… Personalized Learning Teachers have an increasingly complex job to perform.  I was at a conference last week where one of the keynote speakers surveyed the audience on what the most important factor was for them being successful in schoo...

I think one of the more complex aspects a teacher has to wrestle with is assessment and what is worth knowing or what should be understood.  There are many writers, speakers, workshops, etc. on how student learning should be assessed for learning, of learning, how to gather evidence, how to inform teaching, etc.  I’m not a teacher but if I was, I would find that my job has become much more difficult with all the expectations to backward design my lessons, cover an ever broadening curriculum, give my students continuous feedback, and then somehow differentiate learning to meet the abilities, readiness, preferences, and needs of my students.  Not only am I expected to undertake assessment of learning but now I have to make sure to assess for learning. Add to this expectations to integrate and use technology for teaching, to enable my students to use technology for their learning, to give them more control over their learning, and learn the new math curriculum…  It al...

As educators discuss what personalized learning is and how it might be implemented, I think a very important topic should be fluency. “ Fluency (also called volubility and loquaciousness ) is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise .”, Wikipedia (April 17, 2011) Traditional definitions, including Wikipedia’s, talk about a set of fluency skills: reading, writing, comprehension, and speaking.  In our era of technology driven everything, fluency is so much more.  I think the images that Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano ( @langwitches ) created to depict Information, Media, Network, and Global fluencies provides a picture of a broader sense of fluency relevant to today. Becoming an expert in finding the best information, quickly, from multiple sources and mediums, knowing how to analyze, evaluate, and organize it, using it appropriately, and sharing your information is a highly valuable capability today.  With infor...